A badly damaged disc with a debug build of a cancelled Sonic Generations PSP port was found: https://www.facebook.com/ObscureGamerscom/photos/a.660704067455779.1073741828.447538572105664/660703080789211/?type=3&theater
https://www.facebook.com/ObscureGamerscom/photos/pb.447538572105664.-2207520000.1496859640./660703080789211 So apparently someone found an early version of Sonic Generations, but not just for any platform: for the PSP! Unfortunately, the disc it was stored on has received major damage. As of yet, very little of the data has been recovered, and it's unclear as to whether or not the remaining will be recovered either. Besides this, there's allegedly in-game screenshots and music that was acquired with the prototype. These are not publicly available as of yet, however.
I guess TimmiT's post should be merged into this thread since it didn't get traction in the Other Knowledge thread. But anyway, this would have never worked in the West as the PSP was already dead here.
Hopefully we can get ahold of some of the data. more than likely it would have been identical to the 3DS version.
A little more side story on this, the above link is from my site and I got a message about an unreleased PSP game while shopping a few weeks ago. I spent the next few hours or so messaging the person and finally found out it was the unreleased PSP port of Generations, which there's also an unreleased Nintendo DS and Wii version it appears. I asked them if they could find the disk as they wern't sure they even had it still and at around 2am I got sent a picture of the disk which was sadly beyond repair. This person did find some screenshots from it when it did work but it seems their backup of the disk was lost. They tried recovering as much as possible but sadly only 14MB was saved along with 3 screenshots in game and an early remix of Greenhill. I asked if I could release these but this person is worried about upsetting SEGA so sadly I cannot release these at this time. The origin of the disk was from a PSP TOOL from SEGA UK and seems to have been left in the DVD Drive by mistake. (PSP Developer TOOL's had both UMD and DVD for developers to use.) I logged in just to say that while the data seems lost, the screenshots are safely stored by me. when given permission I will release these for everybody to enjoy. To answer the question "is this a 3DS port" it seems llikely seeing as the only level screenshot is an early Mushroom Hill without any background and only front tiles. The disk seems to be from November 2009 making this a very early Alpha build. (Funny enough the build name was leaked around this time too.) Hope this clears up a little more, I'm very tied up in other stuff lately so this will likely be my only reply on this here. If I get an updates they will be posted on my sites FB/Twitter in due course. Thanks.
I find this pretty surprising if it is indeed not a hoax. Like Jax said, the PSP was already dead in the west when Generations was released. Hopefully we'll be able to see those screenshots at least! Thanks for the info N!NJA.
They must not know that SEGA has never done anything in regards to things like this. Hope you can release what you have relatively soon.
This makes no sense, why the PSP? It had been replaced in the development realm with the Vita, by then! I even had one at the time and smelled death on the thing! I always wondered why a Wii version of Generations never happened.
I can understand them not releasing a PSP version (Sonic Rivals didn't even get a release in Japan). But I am surprised they didn't make a Wii game, as Sonic was a big seller on that platform. I think Colours on Wii did better than Generations.
The Wii would have required a different build altogether, as a 3DS-like version would look really simplistic in 2D only (I mean, visually compared to Sonic Colors) and a downgrade from the 360/PS3 version would be too much.
Don't forget that Generations was a 2011 game that came out in November, and the Vita only came out a month later in Japan of that year before propagating to the west. All things considered, the Vita's launch window was woeful and it still has a meager selection to this day, so it doesn't surprise me to see SEGA trying to cover their handheld bases at the time. If the previous posts and the 3DS version are anything to go by, it'd probably just of been a novelty port for a system long dead.
Interesting, maybe if the guy could dump the ROM from the disc, perhaps we can play it. But IDK, if the disc is severely damaged and no data of the game is on it, we may have to do more digging for another version of the PSP prototype.
Although no longer in preservation, I'm still a sonic fan, I was asked to relay this. https://www.facebook.com/ObscureGam.../660703080789211/?comment_id=1533954356797408
I wonder how much progress of the game had been made up until that point. The fact that they label it as a "debug" build gives me hope it's more than just a title screen :P